Page:The Voice of the Negro 1919 - Robert T. Kerlin - 1920.djvu/19

Rh me in my purpose to get at that story and present it to the white public, if that public would accept it.

Obtaining a full list of colored papers and magazines, I applied to them for copies dating onward from July the first. My study table was soon heaped with copies of hundreds of publications. I made a selection of fifty-three, which, after much study, I judged to be the most representative, and subscribed for them. The extracts which constitute the body of this book are made, I may therefore say, from the entire range of current Negro publications, but in the main from the half hundred that seemed to be the ablest, most prosperous, most independent, and most representative. My list of quoted papers, however, numbers eighty, and I studied twice as many.

For the scope of the work, the range of topics dealt with in the excerpts, I refer the reader to the Table of Contents. But to indicate more completely the character of the work I will set down here the following notes:

A period of four months, from July 1 to November 1, is covered. For information on one or two topics I have gone beyond the latter date.

Only colored papers and magazines have been quoted, never any white paper or writer. With three exceptions only has anything been taken second-hand, and these are properly accredited.

A much larger use has been made of Southern papers than of Northern, for obvious reasons.

I have read and re-read my mass of clippings, sifted and resifted them, to reduce their bulk and to select the most typical on the various topics.

All comments, except purely explanatory ones, and all critical remarks have been refrained from. The reader is left to make his own judgments.

No editing except to correct obvious typographical errors has been done.

For every excerpt or article included ten of like character on the same topic have probably been left in my mass of clippings.

The selections are meant to sweep the whole gamut of expression as regards temper and tone from the mildest to the most vigorous. Whatever of "radicalism" and "dangerous tendency" the colored press of America exhibits may be learned from the following pages by all who care to know. Only the unimportant exception is to be made that from the